Synonyms

French

Noun

Friendship is a term used to denote
co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more humans.
This article focuses on the notion specific to interpersonal
relationships. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship
which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, and affection along with a degree
of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis. Friends
will welcome each other's company and exhibit loyalty towards each other,
often to the point of altruism. Their tastes
will usually be similar and may converge, and they will share
enjoyable activities. They will also engage in mutually helping
behavior,
such as exchange of advice and the sharing of hardship. A friend is
someone who may often demonstrate reciprocating and reflective
behaviors. Yet for
many, friendship is nothing more than the trust
that someone or something will not harm them.
Value that is found in friendships is often the result of a
friend demonstrating the following on a consistent basis:

In philosophy, Aristotle is
known for his discussion (in the Nicomachean
Ethics) of philia,
which is usually (somewhat misleadingly) translated as
"friendship," and certainly includes friendship, though is a much
broader concept.

Cultural variations: (stub-section) A group of
friends consists of two or more people who are in a mutually
pleasing relationship engendering a sentiment of camaraderie,
exclusivity, and mutual trust. There are varying degrees of
"closeness" between friends. Hence, some people choose to
differentiate and categorize friendships based on this
sentiment.

Greece

In Ancient
Greece, in Plato's Symposium, a character named Pausanius
asserts: "the interests of rulers require that their subjects
should be poor in spirit, and that there should be no strong bond
of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other
motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants learned by
experience; for the
love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had a
strength which undid their power." (Symposium; 182c). The overall
tone of The Symposium stresses the importance of asceticism and
spiritual love over lust. Critics have long had difficulty
interpreting the various opinions outlined in The Symposium, and
generally agree that Plato's view is prescriptive rather than
descriptive. Nevertheless, the speech of Pausanius provides
evidence for pederasty in 5th century Athens.

Rome

During the time of the Roman
Empire, Cicero had his own
beliefs on friendship. Cicero believed that in order to have a true
friendship with someone there must be all honesty and truth. If
there isn’t, then this isn’t a true friendship. In that case,
friends must be one hundred percent honest with each other and put
one hundred percent of their trust in the other person. Cicero also
believed that for people to be friends with another person, they
must do things without the expectation that their friend will have
to repay them. He also believes that if a friend is about to do
something wrong, and something that goes against your morals, you
shouldn’t compromise your morals. You must explain why what they
are going to do is wrong, and help them to see what the right thing
to do is, because Cicero believes that ignorance is the cause of
evil. Finally the last thing that Cicero believed was that the
reason that a friendship comes to an end is because one person in
that friendship has become bad. (On Friendship, Cicero)

Russia

The relationship is constructed differently in
different cultures. In Russia, for example,
one typically accords very few people the status of "friend". These
friendships however make up in intensity what they lack in number.
Friends are entitled to call each other by their first names alone,
and to use diminutives. A norm of polite behaviour is addressing
"acquaintances" by full first name plus patronymic. These could
include relationships which elsewhere would be qualified as real
friendships, such as workplace relationships of long standing,
neighbors with whom one shares an occasional meal and visit, and so
on. Physical contact between friends is expected, and friends,
whether or not of the same sex, will embrace, sometimes kiss and
walk in public with their arms around each other, or arm-in-arm, or
hand-in-hand.

According to Oleg Kharkhordin in a paper on the
politics of friendship, in Soviet society, friendships were "a
suspect value for the Stalinist regime" in that they presented a
stronger allegiance that could stand in possible opposition to
allegiance to the Communist
party. "By definition, a friend was an individual who would not
let you down even under direct menace to him- or herself; a person
to whom one could securely entrust one's controversial thoughts
since he or she would never betray them, even under pressure.
Friendship thus in a sense became an ultimate value produced in
resistance struggles in the Soviet Union". http://www.csis.org/ruseura/ponars/policymemos/pm_0149.pdf

Asia

In the Middle East
and Central Asia
male friendships, while less restricted than in Russia, tend also
to be reserved and respectable in nature.

Modern west

In the Western world, intimate physical contact
has been sexualized in the public mind over the last one hundred
years and is considered almost taboo in friendship, especially
between two males. However, stylized hugging or kissing may be
considered acceptable, depending on the context (see, for example,
the kiss the tramp gives the kid in The
Kid). In Spain and other Mediterranean countries men may
embrace each other in public and kiss each other on the cheek. This
is not limited solely to older generations but rather is present
throughout all generations. In young children throughout the modern
western world, friendship, usually of a homosocial nature,
typically exhibits elements of a closeness and intimacy suppressed
later in life in order to conform to societal standards.

Decline of close friendships

The number and quality of
friendships for the average American has been declining since at
least 1985, according to a 2006 study. The study
states that 25% of Americans have no close confidants, and that the
average total number of confidants per person has dropped to
2.

In recent times, some thinkers have postulated
that modern friendships have lost the force and importance that
they had in antiquity. C. S. Lewis
for example, in his The Four Loves, writes:

"To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully
human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The
modern world, in comparison, ignores it. We admit of course that
besides a wife and family a man needs a few 'friends'. But the very
tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which
those who make it would describe as 'friendships', show clearly
that what they are talking about has very little to do with that
Philia which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that
Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a
book."

"The intense emotional and affective relationships described in
the past as "non-sexual" cannot be said to exist today: modern
heterosexual men can be buddies, but unless drunk they cannot touch
each other, or regularly sleep together. They cannot affirm that an
emotional affective relationship with another man is the centrally
important relationship in their lives. It is not going too far, is
it, to claim that friendship – if used to translate Greek
philia or Latin amicitia – hardly exists among
heterosexual men in modern Western society."

"Hence, in our cultural context where homosexual desire has for
centuries been considered sinful, unnatural and a great evil, the
experience of homoerotic desire can be very traumatic for some
individuals and severely limit the potential for same-sex
friendship. The Danish sociologist Henning
Bech, for instance, writes of the anxiety which often
accompanies developing intimacy between male friends:

"'The more one has to assure oneself that one's relationship
with another man is not homosexual, the more conscious one becomes
that it might be, and the more necessary it becomes to protect
oneself against it. The result is that friendship gradually becomes
impossible.'"

Their opinion that fear of being, or being seen
as, homosexual has killed off western man's ability to form close
friendships with other men is shared by Japanese psychologist
Doi
Takeo, who claims that male friendships in American society are
fraught with homosexual anxiety and thus homophobia is a limiting
factor stopping men from establishing deep friendships with other
men.

The suggestion that friendship contains an
ineluctable element of erotic desire is not new, but has been
advanced by students of friendship ever since the time of the
ancient Greeks, where it comes up in the writings of Plato. More recently,
the Austrian
philosopher Otto
Weininger claimed that:

"There is no friendship between men that has not an element of
sexuality in it, however little accentuated it may be in the nature
of the friendship, and however painful the idea of the sexual
element would be. But it is enough to remember that there can be no
friendship unless there has been some attraction to draw the men
together. Much of the affection, protection, and nepotism between
men is due to the presence of unsuspected sexual compatibility."
(Sex and Character, 1903)

Recent western scholarship in gender
theory and feminism
concurs, as reflected in the writings of Eve Sedgwick
in her The Epistemology of the Closet, and Jonathan
Dollimore in his Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change:
Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault.

Developmental issues

In the sequence of the emotional development of
the individual, friendships come after parental bonding and before
the pair
bonding engaged in at the approach of maturity. In the
intervening period between the end of early childhood and the onset
of full adulthood, friendships are often the most important
relationships in the emotional life of the adolescent, and
are often more intense than relationships later in life. However
making friends seems to trouble lots of people; having no friends
can be emotionally damaging in some cases. Sometimes going years
without a single friend can lead to suicide.

A study by researches from Purdue
University found that post secondary education (e.g.
university) friendships last longer than the friendships before
it.

Non-personal friendships

Although the term initially
described relations between individuals, it is at times used for
political purposes to describe relations between states or peoples
("the Franco-German friendship", for example), indicating in this
case an affinity or mutuality of purpose between the two
nations.

The word "friendship" can be used in political
speeches as an emotive
modifier. Friendship in international relationships often refers to
the quality of historical, existing, or anticipated bilateral relationships.

Interspecies friendship and animal friendship

Friendship as
a type of interpersonal
relationship is found also among animals with high intelligence,
such as the higher mammals and some birds. Cross-species friendships
are common between humans and domestic animals. Less common but
noteworthy are friendships between an animal and another animal of
a different species, such as a dog and cat.

Friendship contrasted with comradeship

Friendship can be
mistaken for comradeship. Comradeship is the
feeling of affinity that draws people together in time of war or
when people have a mutual enemy or even a common goal. Former New
York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges
wrote: "We feel in wartime comradeship. We confuse this with
friendship, with love. There are those, who will insist that the
comradeship of war is love — the exotic glow that makes
us in war feel as one people, one entity, is real, but this is part
of war's intoxication. As this feeling dissipated in the weeks
after the attack, there was a kind of nostalgia for its warm glow
and wartime always brings with it this comradeship, which is the
opposite of friendship. Friends are predetermined; friendship takes
place between men and women who possess an intellectual and
emotional affinity for each other. But comradeship – that
ecstatic bliss that comes with belonging to the crowd in wartime
– is within our reach. We can all have comrades."
http://listproc.ucdavis.edu/archives/twf/log0305/0052.html As a
war ends, or a common enemy recedes, comrades return to being
strangers, who lack friendship and have little in common.

Bibliography

David Hein, "Farrer on Friendship, Sainthood, and the Will of
God" (in Captured by the Crucified: The Practical Theology of
Austin Farrer, edited by David Hein and Edward Hugh Henderson. New
York and London: Continuum/T. & T. Clark, 2004.
119–48)

John von Heyking and Richard Avramenko (eds.), Friendship and
Politics: Essays in Political Thought. Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2008.